Re: Patch to allow make to load plugins that add new functions.

[Tim Murphy]

On 6 April 2012 21:55, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
>> CC: David Boyce <address@hidden>, address@hidden
>> Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2012 16:13:47 -0400
>>
>> Maybe this is just irrational prejudice but I've never had a good
>> experience using libtool and I'm SO uninterested in fighting with it in
>> GNU make.
>>
>> I will admit that my distaste is so extreme that I've not even gone near
>> it for the last 5 years or more.  Maybe (hopefully) it's much improved.
>
> libltdl has nothing to do with libtool.  It is just a library for
> dynamically loading shared libraries, presenting the same API on all
> supported platforms.  You can use that library but not libtool itself,
> they have nothing in common except the team that is developing them.
>


I had a little look at libtdl.   To be brutal I thought that using
dlopen/LoadLibrary directly was *much* easier. There isn't really
anything madly complicated about what's being done.

I realise that this might mean problems on architectures that don't
support these functions but I can't think up examples.

Either way I think it's again not something one should get stuck on -
the requirements of a plugin system should be quite simple and don't
really need many lines of code so I think that doing whatever's
quickest and easiest right now is good.  i.e in the end you'll have a
function like "load_plugin()" which will use whatever method is
required and the plugin initialiser will get called with some
information and that's about it.  If one suddenly decides to use a
library midway through for some reason then that's great - shouldn't
matter.  If using a new library causes the whole thing to stop working
properly for some reason then the design is probably too complicated
or the library is not suitable.

Regards,

Tim
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